Getting the USB Block Erupter working on Windows 7

If you are accustomed to the nuances of cgminer, maybe it is time to learn bfgminer, because it was WAY EASIER to get these working on my Win7 test build. I’m not hating on cgminer at all; I love cgminer. I’ve heard it even autodetects these devices for you in the newest linux version. So learn linux, ditch Microsoft. But if you don’t _want_ to do that, here are some pointers.

The switch for these devices is -S. Most of the guides and tutorials I’ve read for cgminer basically treat these miners like an Icarus FPGA device.

Here’s in an example of a cgminer string to enable and use these devices (if you had devices registered as COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, etc):

I was never actually able to get cgminer working at all with a single device on COM3. I attempted to exclude GPU’s with -G, I tried different drivers, it did not want to cooperate with me. So let’s try bfgminer, shall we.

I was able to get it online with the latest version of bfgminer by simply using:

bfgminer.exe -S all

This way it runs my GPUS and other devices also. So I recommend it. I’ve excluded the pool options and I assume you can add them yourself. Happy Mining!